Borrowing a leaf from biology to preserve threatened languages

One of the world’s 7,000 languages vanishes every other week, and half – including scores of indigenous North American languages — might not survive the 21st century, experts say. To preserve as much linguistic diversity as possible in the face of this threat, McGill University scientists are proposing to borrow a leaf from conservation biology. When setting conservation goals, ecologists use evolutionary trees – diagrams that show how biological species are related to one another — to identify species that have few close relatives; such species are said to be evolutionarily distinct. Similarly, recent advances in the construction of language trees make it possible to gauge how unique a language is. “Large, well-sampled species trees have transformed our understanding of how life has evolved and helped shape biodiversity conservation priorities,” says Jonathan Davies, Associate Professor of Biology at McGill and senior author of the new study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science. “The construction of more comprehensive language trees provides an equivalent opportunity for language preservation, as well as benefiting linguists, anthropologists and historians.” “The rapid rate of language loss, coupled with limited resources for preservation, means that we must choose carefully where to focus our efforts,” adds Max Farrell, a PhD student in Davies’ lab and co-author of the new paper. “The more isolated a language in its family tree, the more unique information it contains and ultimately contributes to linguistic diversity.” Tongues on the EDGE As a case study, Farrell and co-author Nicolas Perrault, now a… [Read full story]